When I first heard talk of SOPA, of course I thought of Mexican food. But the more I've learned about the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) working its way through Congress, the more of a bad taste it leaves.

On name alone, the legislation should pass easily. What publisher
would condone piracy and oppose efforts to fight rogue websites
trafficking in copyrighted intellectual property?

These are fair questions, especially for companies like Noozhawk and TucsonSentinel.com
that have trademarked their brands, copyright their original content,
and take steps to ensure that material posted on their sites complies
with carefully crafted, lawyer-drafted Terms of Service.

But the larger issues here are free expression, censorship and First Amendment
rights, coupled with changes to Internet protocols that are geek to
most of us but, in fact, are at the very heart of our identity on the
World Wide Web.

SOPA started out as a way to protect intellectual property and the
financial and economic juggernaut that goes along with it. In defiance
of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
there's an evil empire of black-arts practitioners preying on American
companies, especially those in Hollywood. Many of these thieves are
located in foreign countries — well beyond the reach of the enforcers of U.S. copyright
law.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, and a bipartisan group of co-sponsors, proposed a bill to allow the Justice Department
and copyright holders to strike back at websites that are even
unwittingly connected to the offending source. Somebody's got to pay if
the overseas bills are ignored, right?

Once notified, targeted sites would have five days — 120 hours — to
submit an appeal. Under the legislation, if the response is
unsatisfactory, the federal government is authorized to:

But enough about the effects on local independent news sites like the one you're reading. What's in it for you?

Censorship

The legislation allows for the blocking of entire Web
sites for "promoting" copyright infringement, even if it's through
something as insignificant as a link in a user comment on a story. The
death penalty apparently is administered regardless of the presence of
constitutionally protected and clearly non-infringing speech like ads,
commentary and search results.

"The First Amendment requires that the government proceed with a
scalpel — by prosecuting those who break the law — rather than with the
sledgehammer approach of SOPA, which would silence speech across the
board," Harvard constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe wrote in opposing the bill.

Maybe you use email, Craigslist, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Vimeo. I know you
would never, ever link to or forward something whose provenance you
weren't 100 percent sure of; it's your brother-in-law who does that.

But with hundreds of millions of users of their services, do you
think those companies will trust you if their bottoms are on the line?
In all likelihood, they'll begin monitoring and/or restricting
everything you do to prevent the possibility of being sued over
copyright infringement or liability for criminal charges.

Disruption

Every computer on the Internet is identified by a complicated string of unique numbers, but the Domain Name System
registry converts the numbers into more recognizable and memorable Web
site domains, like Noozhawk.com. SOPA contains a controversial filtering
mandate that would allow editing of the DNS, however.

How is that harmful? Engineers have been developing a new DNS
protocol to combat the increasingly common hijacking of a user's
browsing command that redirects the user to a phony website with the
DNS of a trusted domain. What's more, the Internet is inherently
decentralized, which makes it an environment conducive to coders intent
on writing their way around the roadblocks so those black-listed foreign
websites can still be reached.

Fulfilling the law of unintended consequences, SOPA's filtering
requirements would torpedo the new authentication process while doing
nothing to alleviate Web security risks.

Expense

The increased monitoring and analysis that SOPA requires
will pose a significant financial burden, with a negative toll on
Internet innovation and investment. You'll pay for that now as well as
later.

So, what can you do? It's all about Congress at this point. Join me in contacting our respective elected representatives — yours are U.S. Reps. Gabrielle Giffords or Raul Grijalva, and U.S. Sens. John McCain and Jon Kyl — and asking them to help us defeat this ridiculous legislation.

You should also contact Rep. Smith and the House Judiciary Committee, which is to resume deliberations on SOPA (H.R. 3261) in January.

I can think of 50 things that Congress and the Obama administration could do today to clear the path for economic growth in this chronic recession. "Fixing" the Internet isn't one of them.

You can read more about SOPA
from the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose mission is to
defend free speech, privacy, innovation and consumer rights in the
digital world.

Bill Macfadyen is the publisher of Noozhawk, an independent local news site in Santa Barbara, Calif. He can be reached at wmacfadyen@noozhawk.com.

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have your say

1 comment on this story

As to what you ask me to do…I already contacted my absentee congresswoman and my two Senators, and sent them the following letter (edited to say either SOPA or PROTECT IP act) which sums up succinctly how I feel…

Hello,

My name is Bret Linden. I am a constituent living in AZ CD8.

I am writing to inform you that I strongly oppose the “Stop Online Piracy Act”, otherwise known as HR 3261.

Were this bill to become law, it would place an unwarranted burden on law-abiding sites we count on in our daily lives, such as Google and Facebook. It would deprive law-abiding internet users of liberties they currently enjoy. It would make it far too easy for the DOJ to circumvent the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment. In short, it would irreparably harm the very structure of the internet as we know it.

Please take every action within your power to prevent this bill from becoming law.

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